Monthly Archives: May 2010

Well, here it is, done. I’m quite happy with it and it fills a space on my wall quite nicely.

The layout of the trays is as follows:

The dimensions are for the finished trays – I cut the cardstock one inch larger then scored a 1/2 inch in on all sides. I snipped one side of each corner and stuck the together. I’ll try to do another one and take a couple of photos if that isn’t enough info.

After I made the trays I stuck them together with strong double-sided tape in rows then stuck the rows together. I then stuck the whole tray to a piece of 12×12 cardstock and will back it again with A3 craft foam, just to make it a bit more stable and keep it from shifting around against the wall.

The braid that surrounds it all is stuck down with Fast Grab Tacky Glue (and boy does it grab FAST!) and the loop to hang it is just a loop in the braid that I added a couple of stitches to secure the two sides together.

The stamps are, primarily, Stampotique (surprise, surprise) but I also used a Prima Honeycomb, a set of Tim Holtz textures (and the little row of birdies) a tiny screen stamp, and the big swirl, my current fave, from a Fancy Pants 12×12 set. The Distress ink colours were Bundled Sage and Weathered Wood and Vintage Photo, and the people were coloured in similar colours with Copics (I only have 20 so good thing they were in my palette LOL!)

Have a fab Bank Holiday Monday! I’m busy finishing up about three iPad covers for DH to take to friends in the USA when he goes to WWDC (Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference) in a couple of days. Then I don’t care if I never have to make another one. But as he did download the final season of LOST for me onto my Pad (and it does look stunning, I must say) I really shouldn’t moan.

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Just a quick one today, perhaps useful for digital scrappers moreso than paper ones, although no reason you can’t print the results and use them that way. The blyberg.net Catalog Card creator creates, you guessed it, library catalog cards.

You fill in the info and generate the card then save it (instructions in the blurb) I like the little scribbled info and the aged lool of it. Might be a fun thing to use for a journaling spot or as a tag in a mini-album (maybe a “favourite books” one!) or a card topper.

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Let’s start with where it all began. I was arranging my Stampotique stamps in a box, and twisting and turning them to get them to fit.

Just doing that made me think of the mosaic project that Tim Holtz did (I was more thinking of the one in the Compendium book but this is similar, from his blog)

And I wanted to do a sort of mosaic-like thing to hang on my wall. I had it all worked out size wise, and was playing around with the stamps I wanted to use. I knew the measurements and had created the backgrounds, with the idea of putting them on a 12 x 12 sheet of card (you can just see the sheet under the stamps)

I was stamping and colouring the people, I had the title (can you call it journaling if it isn’t a layout?) and I was happily creating in my own little bubble. Then, as is my early morning routine, I hopped around to some of my bookmarked blogs, checking up on what friends, and other inspiring scrappers, were doing when I clicked on Jane’s blog. She has a LOVELY project she taught at Scrapamia (darn I wish I had gone) that uses some sort of folded cardstock boxes to make a shadow box effect. It’s very scrappy and almost vintage, really, really pretty. And that sent me off in a totally other direction – as Jane’s creativity often does LOL!

My boxes are very slim, only a 1/2 inch deep, and are much more simplistic, more like trays, really. I used 4 different sizes :

5 x 4 (three) 3.5 x 4 (two) 4 x 4 (two) 3 x 2 (four)

The clothespins are holding the corners together while the glue dries and so I can test out the arrangement to see if I like it!

So you can see that once the boxes are stuck together they will fit on a 12 x 12 sheet of card. And it works with the size of the stamps..

It’s done now, but this post is already too long and I have to deal with THIS – here is a shot of my desk. Honestly, I am such a messy scrapper.

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I sort of went off the boil on this as I had a few new things I wanted to play with but I managed to sort out a video slide show for the album. I know there are coin envelopes at UK Staples, although they are a slightly different size and the ones I’ve seen are printed on the front, but as they get covered with paper anyway it really doesn’t matter. I quite like the edging effect of using the MS border punch and it really goes together very easily.

I have to say that I hate the fact you only get three seemingly random thumbnails to choose from as your YouTube thumbnail. It may have something to do with the fact my videos are made up of still shots, but the selection is often rubbish. I wish I could say “Use the first image, always” but I can’t.

There are a couple of things in it worth noting (well, I *would* think so, wouldn’t I? LOL!) including using the border punch to make an interesting tag top and using the “ball & chain” for the album binding. I mention it briefly in the video, but the B&C that I used is actually a ceiling fan pull chain. Same stuff – but the TH ones I’ve seen for nearly £9 (one 36 “chain, two connectors) but I got the same sort of length for under £2 and packs of 8 connectors for similar at a US hardware store. Here you can get a box of 100 connectors for under £8 and 10 metres for under £20, although you can buy ball chain by the metre at Homebase so for me the box of connectors is the real must have. Using alcohol ink to colour it (just put the chain cut to length in a baggie with a few drops of alcohol ink in the colour of your choice and smoosh it around till the chain is covered) you can have endless ball and chain goodies for all sorts of things. OK, so no antiqued copper or gold, but for the price difference I can live with that.

Now, back to my current project, another that took three or four things all coming together to extend an idea I had into a better something. No where near at the point of sharing, but soon!

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As I just did the last challenge (with a day to spare, I think, another one has come around very quickly. It’s funny how it came about. I had read the challenge to use purple, and that it had to be a card {shudder} and was clearing up the mess of my milk carton project after taking my WOYWW photos, and came across and old Papercraft Inspirations mag (ok, not so old – it was the May 2010 issue!) and decided to have a quick flick thru it before deciding to toss it or not. And I came across an article on IRIS FOLDING. I’ve never done iris folding – it seemed a lot of faff for no good reason, but as I was looking at the templates the circular one caught my eye (if you click here it will download the template ✿ Issue 73 templates 2.pdf ) and at the same time the lyrics from Dead or Alive You Spin Me Round started spinning around my brain (if I’m honest, more the Marilyn Manson version in my head.)

Like so many UK music artists (Take That, Sandy Shaw, the whole cult of Eurovision, to name a few) Dead or Alive was completely unknown to me but I saw the lead singer on Celebrity Big Brother and heard their version on the radio a lot while that was on TV. Then of course the Flo Rida song came out and it sort of got ingrained in my head, to play every time I saw a circle (I know, my head works that way LOL!) As a sidebar, I was stunned when visiting my sister to find neither she not my nieces had even HEARD of Girls Aloud – but then I had never heard of Adam Lambert til I read and old People magazine at her house so fair enough.

Anyway, the song lyrics and the circle template collided to give me my card idea.

I grabbed a handful of very old papers from my scrap bin (honestly – we are talking 5+ years back papers) and increased the size of the template a bit, cut the aperture, misted on a couple of purples and a yellow-with gold glimmer/shimmer mists thru my baking sheet grid onto the card front then got down to cutting and folding and sticking.

I stamped my girl with heart purse and Copic coloured it (and used a few Sharpies as well as my Copic collection is very small) then cut her out. Her very thin legs were a challenge that me and my Xacto rose to.

One little tip to share – when I cut out a stamped image I always use the edging trick I often do for photos by edging the cut out figure with colours to match (so her arms and legs get skin colour, her boots brown, the purse purple, etc) to minimise the white that would otherwise show

You can see a bit better on the back

It just give, I think, a nicer finish and less of a “halo” effect.

I pop-dotted her with teeny weeny foam squares.

I made the letters by using the font Rock it! and spacing the letters out A L O T and printing them on yellow-with-gold misted cardstock (the circle I cut for the aperture, actually). I cut them each and edged each bit with purple ink. To fit what I wanted (You spin me right round, Baby, right round like a record baby round round round round…) would have meant much smaller letters than I was willing to cut, ink and stick!

I was right, actually. Iris folding is a lot of faff and while I like the look of it I am more about the fast card than the all day one so not sure how often I would do this. But I am glad I did it ONCE, so I can honestly say I tried it.

Honestly, there is just no place with good light, even on a sunny day, in my house to stage a photo, so I popped out to the back patio. Typically the sun went int hiding

but I couldn’t resist a shot or two out the back, to the right…

and to the left…

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Well, I was thrilled to see that my little project from yesterday made one of the top three picks over at the Stampotique Designer’s Challenge. I was actually working on another one, as this is just my sort of thing, and I find the Stampotique images so very inspiring, in a quirky sort of way, so what is on my WW is another project that fits the bill for the challenge but as the challenge is closed and a new one is up (note to self: pay attention to the dates in future!) I can only post it here.

First my desk – a mess as usual, but I am getting better about clearing up the remnants of an old project before beginning a new one. Maybe some day I’ll actually get better about cleaning my stamps LOL!

Unlike so many tidy and detail oriented papercrafters I tend to make use of stuff I have rather that buying custom storage LOL! As you can see my handful of Copics are in an old coffee jar (although I did add a bit of cheap decorating tape around it to pretty it up slightly) and my little tape runners are in an old green tea box.

The project, which is more or less done (or will be by the end of the day) is using a milk carton template from Mirkwood Designs (they have a LOT of templates worth a look so do pop over if this sort of thing appeals to you) and is based on a few things – the HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CHILD? alerts they include on milk cartons in the USA to get the names and faces of missing children into the public eye, and the book The Midwich Cuckoos (also made as the movie Village of the Damned, a fairly good adaptation of the book, and not butchered like so many movie-from-book versions) The Stampotique images (most of which are linked to in the previous post, so I won’t do it again) lend themselves nicely to this sort of thing but I can already see the next challenge is going to be tricky for me as it is a card – and regular readers (do I have any? I sometimes wonder LOL!) will know I am not a natural cardmaker.

I’ll explain some of the references – Rocky, buying a cuckoo clock, is clearly a reference to the title of the book. Smiley, on the Oppley road, is a location from the book. The Dr. is the doctor from the book and movie, and Marci was last seen near Basingstoke, near where I live. Buck (and the stamp is actually titled Uncle Buck) always makes me think of Uncle Duke from the Doonesbury cartoons, who is based on Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, hence Buck being last seen on his way to Las Vegas. The cow is from the Ikhioogla font (I believe it is the lower case a in ikhiooglacows.ttf) and the MILK font is JeannieShrimpton from girlswhowearglasses but not sure it is available anymore as a freebie. It was once available from Banana Frog as a stamp in a couple of different sizes but I can’t seem to find it in the catalog, so maybe not any more. Shame. It’s one of my all time favourites.

I spend a stupid amount of time researching the format of phone numbers in the UK in the 1950s so I could get the phone number correct but never did find anything that helped. So that one is just made up LOL!

I am determined to visit as many posts on WOYWW as I can this week, having missed out last week completely, posting AND visiting. Off to make another cup of coffee to fuel my clicking then back to it! Cant wait to see what everyone else is working on.

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Woo hoo! I think this is my first ever challenge completed for an online challenge where I carry through from start (finding the challenge) to finish (posting it, or in this case, a link to it, on the challenge blog) so I am feeling almost virtuous. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve seen challenges and used them (but for more of a “journal jar” sort of thing, like “oh No Where’s my MoJo?” solution) and even done the challenges as specified but never took the final step and shared it. So this feels fairly momentous for me LOL!

The challenge over on the Stampotique Designers Challenge blog is to use a template. I’ve always wanted to make one of these pyramid boxes so it seemed a good way to kill two birds, as it were. The Stampington template was a good one. and resized up nicely and printing the existing template as A3 makes the pyramid part pretty perfectly 12 x 12 then you can use scraps for the square part.

I made a few small changes – I left off the skewer thru the top and made the hole in the holder a bit smaller (you’ll see why later!) and because without the skewer the holder tends to pop off, I added a smaller square with a smaller hole cut from fun foam, which you can just about see in this shot:

And the slightly grip-y nature of the foam holds it in place fairly well. You can see the “set up” of the piece on the holder with the … punch line, I guess, inside.

The four sides of the box each have a Stampotique image – Rocky and Three in a Round here, each image over a Distress Inked then stamped with water and dried triangle.

And Twinkie (with a little surgery on his arm to reposition it) and Smile are two more “unsuitable suitors”

The happy couple is stamped, coloured with Copics then backed with black card and cut out. I used on of my favourite chisel tip black permanent pens to colour a toothpick for each figure then with a bit of glossy accents I stuck them to the back(you can also see the blob of glossy accents holding the rose between Uncle Buck’s teeth and replacing the daisy in Girl’s hand

I had to trim off a bit of their shoes before I buried their feet in the middle of the roses to make them short enough to fit inside the box when it was closed.

Damn this was fun! I have to say these are def. my fave stamps – I feel a bit of a shopping trip coming on cause I know I need MORE.

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I managed another layout today. I have been looking back thru alllllll the photos we took while visiting my sister and a few jumped out at me as needing to be documented. My DD loves her cousins and was so very excited to go see them. One cousin (both girls) is very close to DD in age – the other is very close to DS, both just slightly younger than my two. But the slight difference in age seems unlikely when you see DD and her DC together. Bizarrely looking at the photo, I could not get the theme tune from the Patty Duke Show (60s sitcom about two cousins, one from the USA, one from England, both played by, you guessed it, Patty Duke) out of my head. queue music – Cousins…identical cousins …..

I had to use that as the title, even though it is clearly not true. Still, it will make me smile at some later date, I’m sure.

A couple of thing – lots of the stuff came from a couple of different Scrapagogo kits. I do so enjoy my box o’ goodies every month. I loved the ribbon but going back to my ribbon box I found just the right pinky, peachy colour to tie the yellow in a bit better. The pale bluey green I got recently at the fabric store (you guessed it, shopping for iPad cover material) and I got three or four bundles, about 5 metres in each, for pence, really.

The butterflies are from that stash I got on our visit, so seemed very appropriate to use!

Lastly, regular readers will know I love my chisel tip black marker. Well, I realized that my Copics also have a chisel tip on one end. It’s really hard to see in the layout image here, but I edged the photo with a peachy Copic (you cn see it much better on the shot from the back) that ds just a very slight tone to the edges of the photo, mostly where the background is very light, like the sky. I will def. play around with that a bit more – surely an excuse for MORE Copics, I think!

Oops. I see I’ve lost the dot over my i – best sort that out! And I added a subscription button in the sidebar, just in case anyone cares to subscribe and get email notification of a new post. I wasn’t sure I would be able to keep this up regularly but so far it seems to be going well so I though I might as well.